As someone who speaks Hungarian, but never seen Hungarian notation outside the context of programming, I'm suddenly realizing that Hungarian notation is probably named after how the Hungarian language itself works.
Words in Hungarian have specific endings that change their "grammatical type" (I forget the grammatical term for that... part of speech?)
Some examples:
1. "-ás/-és": Transforms a verb into a noun that denotes an action or a profession. For example, the verb "tanul" (to study) becomes "tanulás" (study or studying).
2. "-ó/-ő": Converts a verb into a noun that refers to a person who does the action. For example, "tanít" (to teach) becomes "tanító" (teacher).
3. "-hat/-het": Added to a verb to form a new verb indicating possibility or permission. For example, "olvas" (reads) turns into "olvas-hat" (may/can read).
4. "-tlan/-tlen": When attached to a noun, it creates an adjective expressing the lack of something. For example, "szín" (color) becomes "színtelen" (colorless).
5. "-i": Added to a noun to create an adjective indicating origin or belonging. For example, "Amerika" (America) becomes "amerikai" (American).
6. "-ol": Attached to nouns to form verbs. This is often used with foreign words in Hungarian, like "ghosting-ol", "bullying-ol", "coworking-ol".
Additionally, in Hungarian these suffixes can be combined, so if you want to use the English noun "ghosting" as a noun in Hungarian, you still actually have to add the suffixes, so you would say "ghosting-ol-ás".
> The original Hungarian notation was invented by Charles Simonyi, a programmer who worked at Xerox PARC circa 1972–1981, and who later became Chief Architect at Microsoft. The name of the notation is a reference to Simonyi's nation of origin, and also, according to Andy Hertzfeld, because it made programs "look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language". Hungarian people's names are "reversed" compared to most other European names; the family name precedes the given name. For example, the anglicized name "Charles Simonyi" in Hungarian was originally "Simonyi Károly". In the same way, the type name precedes the "given name" in Hungarian notation. The similar Smalltalk "type last" naming style (e.g. aPoint and lastPoint) was common at Xerox PARC during Simonyi's tenure there.
> Simonyi's paper on the notation referred to prefixes used to indicate the "type" of information being stored. His proposal was largely concerned with decorating identifier names based upon the semantic information of what they store (in other words, the variable's purpose). Simonyi's notation came to be called Apps Hungarian, since the convention was used in the applications division of Microsoft. Systems Hungarian developed later in the Microsoft Windows development team. Apps Hungarian is not entirely distinct from what became known as Systems Hungarian, as some of Simonyi's suggested prefixes contain little or no semantic information (see below for examples).
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Simonyi's native language may have had some impact on how he wrote code, but it was not "human language -> write code like Hungarian -> Hungarian notation".
> The resulting code was dense and hard to read. Simonyi’s system came to be known as Hungarian notation, both in homage to its creator’s birthplace and because it made programs “look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language,” according to programming pioneer Andy Hertzfeld. Hungarian is widely cursed by its detractors. Canadian Java expert Roedy Green has jokingly called it “the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques.” Mozilla programmer Alec Flett wrote this parody:
prepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat’s artThe adjBig nProblem?
On my yet to be assembled shelf of random things will be a bunch of books that intend to make one go o_O when they read titles in the background of video call.
What problems? Why most? And why "our"? I find it silly to think that a more precise language is going to solve "most of our problems", it's a bold claim which I believe to be false. No, world problems do not vanish if we were just better at understanding each other, that's not how world problems arise.
Actually, I am not sure that having different meanings of the same word in different contexts is really the problematic part causing ambiguity in conversations.
For example, sarcasm is a much more difficult problem. The words are the same, the meaning of the sentences is the same but the author's intent, the meaning behind those sentences is opposite if they are being sarcastic or not.
